FORT COLLINS, Colo. – By the time the rainy night stretched into early morning, Samantha Spady had been drinking and partying for hours. Earlier it was beer and shots of tequila. Now, inside a fraternity house, she was swilling vanilla vodka straight from the bottle.
The binge had gone on for 11 hours. When it was over, the Colorado State student’s blood-alcohol level was more than five times the legal driving limit in Colorado. She was stumbling, unable to even stand on her own.
Two students wrapped the 19-year-old’s limp arms around their necks and walked her to a forgotten fraternity room full of extra furniture, old beer bottles and the glow of a black light.
They laid her on a couch, and a few minutes later, Spady blinked her eyes and nodded as the last person left the room.
She just needs to sleep it off, her friends thought.
‘It’s what everyone does’
Spady grew up in Beatrice, Neb., a small town in the southeast corner of Nebraska.
The sophomore business major hadn’t really known anyone in Fort Collins, but quickly made new friends. Her mother had always admired that about her, the way people were drawn to her.
Spady had pledged Chi Omega sorority as a freshman, but it took up a lot of time. There were functions to attend and it was hard to balance with schoolwork. She longed for home-cooked meals and her bed at home, and by her second semester, had dropped out of Chi Omega.
Mirna Guerra hadn’t known Spady that long when the two decided to get together Sept. 4, the Saturday before Labor Day and the evening of the big Colorado State-Colorado football game.
Spady picked up Guerra, a freshman, just before 6 p.m. and they went to a house to watch the game. Spady drank a beer, downed two shots of tequila, ate a hot dog and munched on chips and dip. They left two hours later.
They watched the rest of the game at another house, where Spady drank a few beers from a supersize cup. They left around 10:30 p.m.
Friends told police Spady had been out partying the past three nights. It wasn’t unusual for her to drink three or four times a week. Sometimes, Spady vomited and passed out.
“It’s what everyone does,” said Spady’s roommate, Sara Gibson. “Some people party every night.”
It’s college. Away from parents, often for the first time for any extended period, college students can come and go as they please and are free to experiment with alcohol. Drinking becomes part of the culture.
Parties come on the fly, and there’s never a shortage of kegs to tap. In pubs and bars near campus, drinks are cheap, and women often get them free. All-you-can-drink nights for $5 a pop are common. All of it is an invitation for binge drinking, said Henry Wechsler, director of the College Alcohol Studies at the Harvard School of Public Health. And there is no one to tell them “no.”
Nationally, 44 percent of college students report binge drinking – five drinks in a row for men, four for women – at least once in the previous two weeks. Half of those students do it more than once a week.
While the percentage of binge drinkers has stayed about the same over the past 11 years, the amount they drink at one sitting has increased, Wechsler said. Members of fraternities and sororities tend to drink more than other students.
Nationally, there are more than 1,400 alcohol-related deaths each year among college students, according to the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism. Most are the result of automobile accidents.
Just having a good time
Spady and Guerra wanted to find a good party. They soon found one.
For about two hours, they drank and danced to Michael Jackson. Spady downed four or five cups of beer. She may have played drinking games.
“By then, we had started drinking pretty fast,” Guerra said.
Around 2:30 a.m., Spady and Guerra were at the Sigma Pi house, a place she felt comfortable. Spady had lots of friends in the fraternity and had dated a few members.
About 25 people were at the fraternity house, hanging out in the hallway or drinking and talking in rooms.
“You could kind of tell she was drunk, but you couldn’t tell how drunk,” said Matthew Kilby, a student at Colorado Northwestern Community College in Rangely who was at the Sigma Pi house that night.
Around 4 a.m., Spady and Guerra were doing swigs of Spady’s favorite drink, vanilla vodka. They put the bottles to their lips and tilted their heads back, as the others in the room echoed: “Go, go, go!”
Dying alone
Minutes later, Spady was sitting on the front stoop, resting her head on her elbows.
She was unable to stand and fell back. Her head hung down and she didn’t respond when friends spoke to her.
Unresponsive. Incoherent. She should have been taken to a hospital then, said Dr. Charles Lieber, an expert in alcohol metabolism at Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York. But she wasn’t.
Around 5 a.m. Sigma Pi member Baylor Ferrier and a friend helped Spady upstairs and put her on a couch in an unused social room they called “Le Boom Boom.” Ferrier had dated Spady the previous semester and says he had seen her worse; he thought she just wanted to sleep.
Guerra stayed with Spady for a half hour, urging her to walk back to her dorm room with her. She tried to help Spady stand, but Spady swayed and then fell over, so Guerra put her on another couch in a storeroom.
Spady opened her eyes, but couldn’t speak well. She nodded her head. She just wants to sleep, Mirna thought. She’ll be fine.
But the homecoming queen with the megawatt smile was dying.
She was likely in a coma, Lieber said. Her brain cells asleep, her respiration slowed. If she had gotten medical help, he said, even that late she might have lived. But there was no help in the Sigma Pi storeroom.
Soon after Guerra left, Spady took her last breath.
As Sunday dawned and the glint of orange crept through the mountains, Spady’s cellphone started ringing.
Her mother, Patty Spady, called, then waited. She called again. Still no call back. She tried not to worry, but it was so unlike her daughter not to call back.
The booze still flows
Almost 13 hours after Spady had been left to sleep off the drunken night, a fraternity member was giving his mother a tour of the house. Beer bottles and cans littered the house. Panties and bras hung from the entryway chandelier; a stripper pole was in one room.
When he opened the door to the social room that had been stuffed with extra couches, he saw Spady’s alcohol-poisoned body, clad in jeans and a yellow T-shirt. Her long blond hair was pulled back. Her knees were on the floor, her face resting on a foam cushion. Her arms were outstretched to each side, almost like she was crawling.
It looked like she was sleeping.
“Hello?” he asked. “Hello?”
He touched her leg. It was cold and stiff.
She had a blood alcohol level of 0.436 percent. The coroner said it probably was higher when she was left there; her body would have continued to metabolize alcohol while she was unconscious.
Since Spady’s death, the parties continue, the booze still flows.
But the Sigma Pi house has been shut down. Fraternities have banned alcohol, and alcohol sales are banned inside the football stadium. Nineteen people were cited for alcohol-related offenses as part of the investigation into Spady’s death.
“It’s not so much that we have a problem,” Sigma Pi member Matthew Dunn said. “It’s more that we have a few people who make the wrong decision. Sometimes young people don’t know how to handle alcohol.”
On Colorado campuses alone this fall, there have been four other alcohol-related deaths.
“It’s not just the students on that campus. It’s not just the faculty. It’s not just the bar owners. Everybody in the community has a responsibility for some changes to take place,” Patty Spady said.
Guerra and other friends Spady was with that night still party. But they also remember Spady, and they wonder how she could have drank so much – enough to die – and they didn’t know it.
“I was thinking, why didn’t I stay with her?” Guerra said. “Why didn’t I know something was wrong?”
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